Solutions are known from the prior art which aim to index the cache of a server terminal by the address of the client terminal on the underlying communication network.
A first known technique of the prior art consists in indexing the cache of the server terminal by the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) address.
This technique, which is well described in the RFC 2068 of the http 1.1 standard (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2068.html), has the primary disadvantage of not allowing consideration of a mixed population of client terminals requiring content suited to their specific characteristics (screen size, memory, etc.). Consequently, cached content will be returned in the same state following any request coming from client terminals requesting the same content page URL address on the server, which makes this http cache mechanism particularly unsuitable and therefore unusable within the context of the invention, which, as a matter of fact, aims to take account of the characteristics specific to each client terminal in order to adapt and return the requested content in a form better suited to the technical constraints of the client terminal.
Another known technique of the prior art proposes to index the cache of the server terminal by the URL address (Uniform Resource Locator) and by the characteristics of the client terminal at the origin of a content request from the server. This technique translated in Section 14.43 of the RFC 2068 defining the http 1.1 standard (http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2068.html) cannot also be applied to the problem solved by the invention, in the sense that it would require the client terminal at the origin of a dynamic content request to be in a position to transmit all of its characteristics on different lines of the http header of its request bound for the server terminal. Such being the case, no client terminal on the market is in a position to propose such a relatively disadvantageous approach, because it would therefore require being able to control implementation of the transmission of the characteristics to the server terminal by the client terminal, which the technique according to the invention actually seeks to avoid through the genericity of the proposed solution.
Furthermore, according to the prior art, such a technique would require the technical criteria or characteristics of the client terminals to be fixed or for the combinations of client terminal criteria to be duplicated at the start of content generation.
Another disadvantage of the http standard is linked to the fact that it requires advance knowledge of the parameters to be put into the cache of the server terminal, for a given type of client terminal at the origin of a request for a page or, more generally speaking, for dynamic content.